Menu

Category Archives: Directive: Working with a Partner

So now that Sean made the box look neat and basically new, I passed the box on over to Communications Arts major Kevin Dam. He helped me in my earlier posts create the basic font template for the box, so I passed him the picture of the newly cleaned up cigarette box and he helped me add the font on to the photo.
It turned out to look a little something like this…
This took a lot more work than getting the image photoshopped because it really took us a while to fidget with the font colors, size, and spacing. We had to make sure the word Marlboro wasn’t too close to the right, because if not it would look like the word Sky was getting pushed off the box. Another really important design aspect I did was remove the Philip-Morris emblem overall, this box looks friendlier and we all know who Marlboro belongs too. I made this choice with Kevin because after much discussion we realized that Philip-Morris, the name itself, thanks to all those lawsuits against their company and what not, kind of has a more negative connotation. For some reason the Marlboro brand still does not, I guess this is because there is a disassociation between the cigarettes themselves and the men who own the company. When you see or hear the words “Philip-Morris” you get an image of sneaky southern businessmen trying to sell you cancer sticks. When you hear “Marlboro” you think of cowboys, Americana, and anybody in pop culture and in your life who smokes them
Overall I am pleased with the results of both of my collaborations and I feel like now that we got the font in order, the box looks a whole hell of a lot more realistic.

I was absent the day we needed to work with partners, so when the directive to work with somebody on a brand concept came up I was left a little high and dry. None the less, I knew I had to make it work somehow, so I scoped out some of my own partners.
So for this post, remember how I created that 3D model of a huge cigarette box with the new Marlboro Sky logo on it? Well I was thinking how I kind of screwed up how the font looked like, so it does not look very realistic. I also wanted to take a picture of it by itself so that way you as the audience could visual it as an actual cigarette box.
Don’t get me wrong, it looks like a cigarette box, but not a real one. So I teamed up with British photographer and good friend of mine Sean Stredwick. He has shot for Elle Magazine before and spends most of his time in Miami, he is a reputable photographer so I knew his work would be able to make the object look more like an actual cigarette box.
His step of the process was to photograph the box plain & simple, and then photoshop the squiggly wording I painted on there.
So after the basic shots were taken, here is what the box looked like…
This was actually really simple, what took the most was setting the shoot up and putting the box on the right kind of background. Since we got the lighting right, photoshopping my awful painted on font did not take too long.
What really took a long time was the next collaboration I had.